"Decals of Desire"

July 20, 2017

Look for Remus in the index of a bookAnd you are bound to get “See Romulus”Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonderAbout indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the formerAs the plural except in a financial context, and howAn index to a book that may not exist may implyA whole biography, as my friend Paul VioliShowed in his poem “Index.” My late friendPaul Violi, whom I still see in the streetSometimes, walking along at an unhurried paceSo if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the cornerBefore the light turns green.

-- David Lehman (2013

An avid student of history, Paul was born on 20 July 1944, an historic day; the day the plot to take Hitler's life failed.

From an interview (with Martin Stannard, May 2004): "I was quite happy to get the award but it was that 'lifetime' modifier -- 'Lifetime Bereavement' is what I also heard. Sounded more like a gong than a bell. A 'Hey, don't rush me!' reaction. The check hasn't arrived yet. Now that always has a rejuvenating effect.""The main thing about the NY School was the openness, the adventurousness, the links with artists and painting.""There are poems I've been reading for decades and they're still giving me reasons to read them again. Keats' 'On First Looking at Chapman's Homer' -- That's magnificence! Images of vast silence used to describe astonishment at a "loud and bold" voice. Not bad for a 21-year old."

Michael Quattrone's profile of Paul Violi appeared in Jacket. A brief excerpt: "Sixty-six West Twelfth Street. Paul Violi wears a Harris Tweed jacket over a pale blue Oxford shirt, a pair of chinos and practical leather shoes. He looks decidedly sheveled, although he has been shuttling between uptown and downtown campuses all day. He has just had another espresso and a smoke. He has made some last minute photocopies for this evening’s workshop, which will begin at eight. His sheaf of papers includes the student work that caught his fancy this week, as well as sample poems by Gregory Corso, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Philip Sidney, and Stephen Dunn. On a different day it might be Mayakovsky, Robert Herrick, Rilke and Verlaine."

"The critic Terence Diggory, whose readings Violi admires, was the first to posit that Violi acts the part of Renaissance Fool. That characterization of the poems is appealing because it accounts for their humor without neglecting the more serious concerns of craft or depth. In a review of Breakers, Diggory writes, ‘The spirit of spoof is so prevalent in Violi’s work that it is easy to mistake it for mere game playing.’ He adds that the work ‘reveals serious aesthetic, cultural, even metaphysical implications.’"

"A partial inventory of the mundane forms Violi has poetically adapted includes: a page of errata, a glossary, a multiple choice exam, and a survival guide; the notes of a naturalist, an elevator notice, mock histories, mock translations, and a product testimonial; one catalogue of fireworks, one of used books, and a third of damaged antiquities; a motivational flier, the advertisement of a sponsor, a radio pledge drive, and a police blotter; clues to a crossword puzzle (whose numbers follow the Fibonacci sequence), a cover letter, a television listing, an acknowledgements page, and a personality survey." -- Michael Quattrone

William Grimes's obituary appeared in the New York Times on April 15, 2011.

June 01, 2017

Issue 3 of Decals of Desire has just launched. In addition to the usual fine lineup of art and poetry, this issue includes tributes to poet Tom Raworth, who passed away earlier this year. Contributors include John Ashbery, Fanny Howe, Michael Lally, Doug Lang, David Lehman, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Martin Stannard, who includes his 2003 review of Tom Raworth's Collected Poems.

February 04, 2017

In 2003 I was invited to read at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on England’s east coast. At the welcome party I was buttonholed by the Festival director, who said she had someone she wanted me to meet. Moments later I was saying Hello to Mark Halliday, and he’s been a friend ever since. We hit it off immediately, and went on to spend most of the weekend in each other’s company, sharing our enthusiasm for the work of Kenneth Koch, as well as a passion for being rude about 95% of all the other poets in the world. The highlight of the weekend (if you discount our readings, which were, of course, sublime) was when we were in a coffee shop (I think it was a coffee shop; it may have been tea) and standing at the counter ripping with great pleasure into one of the Festival’s other poets, only to realize that “he” was standing within earshot just behind us. Oh, how we laughed.

The following Spring I visited Mark and his family (the poet Jill Rosser, and their daughter Devon) at their home in Ohio. Since then he and I have collaborated on over a hundred short plays “inspired” by Koch’s short plays, as gathered in his One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. They are not as good as Koch’s, of course, but they are nevertheless (as Mark has mentioned many times over the years) works of some genius. Some of the plays are very short, and some stretch to two or four pages or even more. Mark has a tendency to want plot lines (or what claim to be plot lines) to develop, whereas I usually think that by the time we’re approaching the bottom of page 1 it’s time to get out – and I’m usually the one who brings things to a close by, for example, having the actors/characters decide it’s time to go home. On one occasion, in a play called “Chess”, in which the characters are the chess pieces chatting to one another during a game, a dog dashes into the room and upsets the table and sends all the pieces crashing to the floor. Curtain.

Mark and I are very different writers in many ways. At Aldeburgh we had, and have continued to have, somewhat opposing views on the place of the anecdote or “real event” in a poem, and I think he thinks I’m sometimes too whacky. Then he goes and writes stuff like this:

MILDEWED ANTHOLOGIES

Fragged and pre-emptingly disnerved am I

by megrims forthrising from the down-sucked

gravity-humbled fungal-damp discompositional

demotion/dismissal of disremembered claimants.

Their non-negotiable odor-sad weary-trope defunctness

sticks in my aspirational craw.

which is not exactly typical of his work, but you know…. Too whacky?

The other side of Halliday is much more connected to the dictionary you have on your bookshelf. Several poems in Thresherphobe, his most recent collection, are undoubtedly prompted by the fact that the author is getting old – and, although ageing can sometimes be a tiresome subject to read about (especially when you are old) Halliday treats of it with a characteristic charm and wit and a light touch that is hard to find elsewhere – especially in Poetry World. In an essay on Koch in Pleiades (which you can read here) Halliday spoke of Koch’s own ageing, and how it had affected his work – about decades in which the splendidness of being young and brilliant naturally tends to giveway to other truths of disappointment, regret and loss. Thanks to Koch's honesty, that concession is a crucial part of the story presented by his work across the years. However, what never disappears from his poetry is the palpable and contagious feeling that to be a poet is great luck. The poet's vocation often induces anxiety, yes, but the anxiety is part of an adventure not to be missed

Yes, to be a poet is “great luck”. Halliday, like Koch, knows that to do this stuff is a lot of things, and one of them is, believe it or not, “fun”. In his own poetry, whatever the subject matter, that knowledge is never far away. He’s at his finest when the two strands of his genius (the dictionary and the extra-dictionary) combine, as they often do, in varying degrees. Sometimes that combination is just one word, or even only a name, but it always counts. In a poem in Thresherphobe entitled “Spunktilio Awaits the Biographer” the poem itself is relatively straightforward, though it comes with a typical dose of amused and/or bemused self-awareness:

But this is not a review of all Halliday’s poetry, or of his usually disregarded other career as a great writer of short plays (if someone helps him), but rather to draw your attention to “Prayer for Kenneth” (Koch, naturally), his poem in Decals of Desire #2, which you can find here. I shall not quote the poem in its entirety because (a) I think that’s not “done” here and (b) it would severely reduce the number of reasons for your visiting the magazine’s website, so let me restrict what I say to this:

the very least one might ask of a poem so titled and “for” someone of Koch’s vitality and invention and (here comes a cliché I might regret) lust for life should be that it reflect something of those qualities. In this poem, Halliday prays that

the zany yet thoughtsome magus MacShane Depew

bestir himself to fashion a beauteous woman

and, over the course of the next seven lines, incorporates elements of western Finland, Tibet, Siam, Neapolitan opera, as well as Monica Vitti and Brigitte Bardot into this fantasy woman, and prays that:

….. Depew send her springing into the absence where Kenneth waits to amaze him generously with her throbby bounty till he feels an oceanic completion of his long quest to reach the glow at the core of desire

But the poem does not end there. A “beauteous woman” may well be a recurring presence in much of Koch’s poetry, but Halliday knows why. The poem ends pointedly and movingly with mention of Karen, Koch’s wife and, finally, his “whole sufficient life”.

Koch once asked me what it was about his work I liked and, momentarily stunned by having to answer such a question from one of my poetry heroes, I said that it made me want to be alive. Koch said he reckoned that would do. Halliday’s fine poem will more than “do” as a fitting prayer for one of the greats.

*

Decals of Desire #2, something of an Abstract Expressionist/New York School “special”, and featuring among others Tony Towle, Charles North and David Lehman, is <a href="http://decalsofdesire.blogspot.com">here</a>.

November 06, 2016

Of course, it’s not his real name, though I am led to believe one half is real; the other half, as he once remarked, is “an act of concealment.”

I first came across Eric Eric in 1986 when I was editing my then magazine joe soap’s canoe. A chap I know, Richard Catchpole, sent me some of Eric’s poems. In the course of a long and rambling letter catching me up on his recent doings (he thought I was interested) Catchpole told me he had been working temporarily for a company doing the catering for a telephone engineers’ conference, and he had “fallen in” with a chap attending the event who wrote “weird little poems”, and he thought I might like to see some of them.

One of the first poems I read, and subsequently published in joe soap’s canoe 10, was this:

AIR

The air is where

The air is. And where

The air is, is where

There is a stinking bus.

I was pretty much bowled over by what at first I thought to be a somewhat individual take on a minimalist approach to poetics, but I mainly fell in love with that sledgehammer of a final line that made me laugh out loud at the same time as realizing the poet and I at some point in our lives had experienced the same kind of bus service. This, for me, placed the poem absolutely in the everyday world, though it came with a dollop of questionable sanity for good measure. But I also initially assumed Catchpole was messing with me – he has his playful side, and I would not have put it past him to try and trick me into publishing a figment of his somewhat self-indulgent imagination. In fact, I was only finally convinced of Eric’s real existence when I met him briefly in Nottingham in 2008. We had kept in very occasional touch since I shut down the canoe, and he was visiting the city on some kind of training course to do with his work. He was still a sort of telephone engineer but now did something I vaguely understood to be to do with mobile phones; he said he was too near retirement to be much bothered to learn anything new, but it was a few days in a good hotel, and the financial subsidies he was getting for being away from home were excellent. Knowing I was back from China and working as the Royal Literary Fund’s Writing Fellow at Nottingham Trent University, he suggested we meet up for a drink. I knew enough about him by that time to know that, if he was indeed real, this was an uncharacteristically sociable move on his part, and I jumped at the chance to meet him. It’s an hour and ten minutes of my life I will never get back, but they do say it’s not always a good idea to meet your heroes.

But I am jumping ahead of myself.

To step back to the 1980s, I had published Eric in a couple of subsequent canoes, but then he kind of fell off my radar until a few years later, by which time I’d shut down the magazine. But he had evidently decided that trying to goad me into opening it up again would be something of a mission for him, and his first few communications during the early 2000s somewhat harped on about it. But eventually he gave it up as a lost cause, and our contact settled into his sometimes telling me a poem of mine he’d seen was good, bad or indifferent, and sometimes letting slip an opinion or two about poetry in general.

I had learned that the poems I had published in 1990 were among the last he had written: unbeknown to me at the time, he had announced, in the personal columns of London’s Times, that he wished to devote the remainder of his life to finding the perfect corduroy trousers. Eric had also shown himself to be well-read but highly opinionated. He shared my liking for the poets of the New York School: he said he admired their brains and their wit. But he also once said that John Ashbery’s poems sometimes annoyed him, although he'd be able to find it in his heart to forgive if Ashbery would only respond to his invitation to go for a swim together next time they found themselves in the same city. I was never quite able to get to the bottom of that one. As for current British poetry, he told me when we met that he’d more or less given up on it. His withering assessment of some of the country’s most well-known and “much-loved” contemporary poets should probably not be repeated here (do libel laws apply on the internet?) and he said he was currently more interested in delving into the world of the pre-17th century sonnet. When I asked him if he was writing sonnets he got up, in what I gather now to be true Eric fashion, and went in search of the pub’s toilet.

When my friend Rupert Mallin and I announced Rupert’s new art and poetry magazine, Decals of Desire, Eric pounced like a cat that had been lurking in the bushes waiting for its moment to catch a sparrow (though anyone less cat-like than Eric Eric is hard to imagine). It turned out that earlier this year he had taken up the pen again because, and I quote: “I am needed.” I had often asked him why he had never published anywhere other than the canoe, and he had simply said it didn’t interest him, and that he would probably still severely restrict what he called his “public appearances” – I had long since understood from some of the things he said that Poetry World as a whole struck him as not much more than a club for mutual back-scratching involving (with some honorable exceptions) people whose back one would not want to touch.

But anyway, he sent me a little group of poems with a note that he asked be added to them if we published: “This is some poems about people. I have others about animals, but they’re not as good.” This was quintessential Eric, and I was smitten. The first thing I noticed was that his style had not changed at all in the last 30 years. Here are a couple of the poems:

THE DOORMAN

Sometimes I think

I am the door

And sometimes I know for sure

THE ARTIST

I have feelings

I have feelings

I have feelings (and some paint)

Minimalism is obviously (and somewhat paradoxically) a pretty wide-ranging and at times contentious field – a minefield, even – and how it’s poked its head in the poetry door since the early years of the last century has surely been the topic of all kinds of books and essays and arguments. For me, it’s a debate in which I’m not very interested, insofar as I don’t care how long or short a poem is, or what’s been left out or left in: let’s face it, we have even had poems with no words in them at all. Call me old-fashioned, but I respond mainly to an elegance of language and the wit and intelligence of a writer, to something subtle and elusive in a piece of writing that makes me want to be alive and thankful for having had the privilege of sharing the experience of a particular poem, no matter its form or provenance. I’m not sure if that makes me sound like a moron or a genius, but no matter.

Eric’s minimalism, by which I mean his poems’ brevity, is not about itself (as some so-called innovative poetics seem to be) and it’s not a pose or a posture or the obvious result of a definitive and reasoned poetic. Yes, Eric understands line breaks and rhetoric, and even a little bit of French (and probably some Klingon), but he understands also that some things come naturally. I once asked him how much time he might spend writing a poem, and how much he edited and/or cut down. His answer was aptly brief: very little time, no more than ten minutes including drinks and toilet breaks, and absolutely no cutting down. They start short and stay short. It occurs to me that Eric’s brevity extends not to the point where what there is to be said has for poetic reasons to be only an oblique utterance uttered obliquely, leaving the reader to bring to the text what they will, but instead reaches with a workmanlike confidence only what it considers to be its point and where it’s satisfied there’s nothing else to say. And, if there were something else to say, Eric is certainly not the man to say it. And if he were the man to say it, he wouldn’t say it in a poem because that’s not what poems are for: if he wanted to say it he could write a letter to the newspaper, or start a blog, or bang his head against a Facebook wall, or troll around on Twitter. But he’s almost certainly better than that, and would rather spend time in his garden and grow his own onions.

I don’t think anyone else is writing poems quite like Eric Eric. For more than 30 years he has followed his own path (or fallen asleep on it) and if he had been bothered he could even have become a household name. But he isn’t bothered. He can’t even be bothered to be unknown. I love him for that. At the risk of over-exposing this somewhat retiring character, we are almost certainly going to feature him in the next issue of the magazine, too. He has sent some more poems, including this one:

SELF-ASSESSMENT

Do you think?

Is this –

(any good)

?

This little poem at first seemed to me almost inane in its simplicity, but the apparently unnecessary dash and parentheses are a wry nod towards a lack of necessity that makes us think, paradoxically, of necessity. One of the other poems he sent is about a glove puppet frog called Fred. It’s really good.